The Way of All Flesh
by Insomniac Owl
Summary: Simon might not believe in his mother's god, or even the Undead Prophet's, but he believes in himself, and he knows this world will only accept them if they carve the space out with their teeth.


**The Way of All Flesh**

_By Insomniac Owl_

* * *

At the commune the Undead Prophet tells him: Go to Roarton. Find the first Risen. The cold light of that place, so far north they were halfway to Scotland, feels suited to them. All those undead wandering cold and pale-eyed as the fog so that once, when he first arrived, the Prophet came up to him stripped to the waist and Simon didn't seen him until he spoke. He's seen the Prophet in other guises since then, in masks and handkerchiefs and once covered in blood - weird night, don't ask - but he's learned to love the look of undead flesh, including his own. He came to this place hating himself and the world, but at the Prophet's right hand he's found hope and a future, a reason to wring everything he can from this second chance at life.

So. Go to Roarton, the Undead Prophet tells him. Find the first Risen.

And he does.

* * *

Kieren says he came up into a storm. It must have been the same one Simon pulled himself up into, later that day and a hundred kilometers south; he remembers the faint wetness against his skin, like standing too near a waterfall. It had been late afternoon, the light storm-dimmed and uncertain, the air cold and a hunger in him not unlike the cravings he'd once felt for meth, or cocaine, or whatever prescription pills he'd been taking that week.

By all rights, he and Kieren shouldn't be sitting here. Simon shouldn't be making awkward small talk with Kieren's parents, and he shouldn't have to listen to some arsehole's story about the time Kieren's sister shoved a shower pole through someone's eye socket. It's not the first time he's heard stories like this, of course. People will talk about anything when they think you're one of them, and more when they know you aren't, and Roarton's the worst, but an arsehole's an arsehole no matter where you take it. It's just, looking at the white sun on Kieren's face as he speaks, it occurs to Simon that they're really quite lucky. That he, in particular, is lucky. Dead of an overdose at twenty five, then risen from the grave to a new purpose, to people who listen, to this boy sitting next to him with his hands curled into fists against his thighs.

Kieren was the first. It's like a blow to the head, hearing him say it. Simon opens his mouth, interrupting, needing to know for sure and Kieren says yes, yes, just let me tell my story. He is angry, he rants, he shouts at his parents and at the boyfriend. He is the most beautiful thing Simon has ever seen.

I found you, he thinks, dumbstruck, and then he is dragging his coat off the back of his chair, and he is following Kieren out.

* * *

Not even death knows everything. Is there a heaven, Simon's mother asked when he returned. I don't know, Mum. I don't know if there are angels waiting for us, or if we'll burn in a lake of eternal fire, or if there's nothing waiting for us at all. I don't remember. The Prophet has that thing about the Risen holding the keys of death in their hands that people quote like scripture, but they don't. Not really. They've seen the other side but it's just a big blank, like he fell asleep and then woke up again. Simon's never been much for religion, and that hasn't changed since he came back.

And yet. And yet.

There are things the Prophet says that set something to burning inside of him. They don't make him want to sing hymns with the others, but he knows he's in the right place. He might not believe in his mother's god, or even the Undead Prophet's, but he believes in himself, and he knows this world will only accept them if they carve the space out with their teeth. This world is theirs by right, but they're going to have to take it. Because if he could be cut apart like an animal in the very place that was supposed to be helping him, how can anyone expect they'll be accepted in the outside world?

The Undead Prophet understands that, and understands him. It's why he makes Simon a disciple only six months after he meets him, at a tiny ceremony by the lake. Dark heavy clouds, sheep milling around them, the Prophet's fingers cool against his forehead. It's why The Prophet puts him in change after he leaves. It's not even hard. People just come to him, tired, pale, lugging suitcases and years of soul-destroying guilt and self-hatred. He teaches them how to love themselves, how to love each other - how to fight anyone who doesn't.

He meets Amy. And then he meets Kieren, through the postcards she gets in the mail every week. Simon is just curious at first, because he and Amy have been thrown together a lot, and most people are there because they don't have anywhere else to be, because they don't have anyone to write them. But the postcards are nothing scandalous, or even very exciting. Mostly they're accounts of small-town life and how much Kieren hopes Amy is okay, that she found what she'd been looking for. Sometimes there is poetry. Sometimes there are very small, very accomplished drawings. But Simon can feel the desire to escape like an actual pulse in the words, and he recognizes it, the longing like a hunger in your chest, the wretched desperation.

Things are changing out there, he reads. I'm worried about you.

"Should I be jealous?" he murmurs one day into Amy's hair.

She starts, turns. "Sod off," she says, slipping the newest postcard onto her vanity, but she's smiling. "Kieren Walker is the kindest, most handsome boy I know - even more than you. But he's gay." She winds one slow hand into the fabric of his coat. "So you see, I haven't much chance at all."

"Assuming you wanted one." He's looking at the postcard, at the now familiar slanted scrawl. He's seen eight year olds with better handwriting. I've been taking day trips, he reads. The West Pennine Moors are something else.

"Assuming I wanted one," Amy repeats. She has one hand wrapped in the collar of his overcoat, and the other drifts lightly up his chest. Simon tilts his head, considering her nearness. Her face is pale as moor ice, her eyes the shocking yellow and white of dandelions.

"The Prophet contacted me this morning," he says, and feels her go still against him.

"You're kidding."

"He has a mission for me. For us."

* * *

It's getting dark when they reach the house, finally. Amy isn't in. Kieren storms through the rooms and sits on the couch and stands up again too quickly. It's the same kind of furious energy he had the week before, when he came in so angry and desperate, kissing him like he would fall to pieces if he didn't.

"Come here." He jerks his head, takes Kieren by the shoulder. "My room's just down the hall."

He looks into each room as they pass it, but the guest room and the bathroom are all empty. So is Amy's room, across from his at the end of the hall.

Simon lingers in the doorway for a moment, looking at the embroidered slipcovers and the pink sheets. It had belonged to Amy's aunt before she died, and Amy inherited the house, but it still doesn't look like Amy lives here. She kept all the furniture and the sheets and the little ceramic figurines, the china teacups in the cupboard and the little silver spoons. She's mounted a cross on the wall above the bed, though, and the pictures above the vanity. Jesus with his fucking bleeding heart, his stupid self-sacrifice. You have to make your own way in the world these days, Simon knows. Especially people like them.

"Sorry," he says, turning, "my room's just here."

But Kieren's already walking past him, into Amy's room. Simon stays in the doorway as Kieren sinks onto the edge of the bed, as he drops his head into his shaking hands.

"Sorry," Kieren says, not looking up, "I'm sorry, I just couldn't -"

"Hey. Hey, no. There was nothing wrong with any of what you said back there." Then, softer: "They needed to hear it."

"I know. It's not that. I just, I finally realized. They're my family and they still haven't really accepted that I'm - that I'm not -"

"Like you are."

His head snaps up, hands flying. He's gesturing toward something but Simon doesn't know what; maybe his parents, sitting eating creamed leeks with his sister and that shite-licking bollix. "How can they sit there and listen - no, how can they expect me to listen to that kind of bullshit? I don't want to do this anymore." His voice trembles, but then he spits, "To pretend."

Slow, Simon thinks. Slow. Easy. He sweeps his tongue out across his lips. "So don't."

It takes a long time for Kieren took look up, and when he does his hands are still shaking. But he moves with purpose, deliberate and certain, taking his contacts out and flicking them onto the floor like bits of trash he found in his hair after rolling around in wheelie bins. There's a flannel on the vanity counter, and he picks that up next. Under the coverup mousse his face is very pale: light blue-black of veins at the throat, the aborted blossoming of decay giving his skin a faintly mottled look. This is what they're supposed to look like. This is what the world was meant to see.

He watches Kieren swallow, then stand, then come toward him. There's something still, something certain in the way he moves that makes Simon's mouth go dry, and can't look away when Kieren wipes the flannel across Simon's face too, again and again until it's clean. Simon's still wearing contacts - brown, though his eyes had been green before; he had to borrow Kieren's - but Kieren's still in most of his makeup, the mousse streaky and worn across his cheek. The old lamplight makes his skin look almost golden.

"You -"

The kiss is deliberate, but soft. Kieren leaning in, the flannel still in his hand when he lays his palm against Simon's cheek. Simon turns his face into it, closes his eyes, just for a moment. Oh, he thinks. Oh. So this is what rapture feels like.

The house is quiet. If he listened, he could probably hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, the clock ticking in the hallway. He can feel Kieren's weight a few inches away, pulling him in like a moon in orbit. This is it. He looks up, takes a breath he doesn't need.

"C'mere." His voice is low, rough and tangled like he's been sick for a week, and then Kieren is rushing against him, their mouths colliding, his shirt bunched in Kieren's hands.

Kieren's kissed him before, in the doorway of this house, in the street, but never this fiercely. And Simon's kissed plenty of people, but it's never felt like this. His spine tingles, a million tiny insects running slipshod over his bones, hair pushed up between his fingers and the ends of them aflame with nerve endings. He looks at Kieren and thinks, Yes, thinks, This is it. He's been walking blind in a maze of small-town politics and prophecy and this is what he's been searching for since he crawled out of his grave into the rain.

You're going to save us.

He reaches for Kieren, pulling him in with a hand clasped on either side of his neck. "Come here," Simon says again, into his mouth. "Come here."

* * *

Simon buys the house Amy finds them in the woods, a bungalow with gorgeous dormer windows and a big shed out back. It's dirt cheap, but the money is the Prophet's, and when they leave they'll sell it if they can. It'll give them a place to meet when things start getting ugly in town, and the house in town is too small to have any kind of real gathering anyway. Only three rooms and a tiny sitting room, only enough space in the kitchen to synthesize small batches of Nortryptyline.

Simon does the work at night, when the neighborhood around them is quiet and still, dark stars over a dark street. It's peaceful. He works with beakers and rubber tubing like the kind he used to tie around his arm to get high, with long metal droppers and thick gloves the whole time, because burn scars won't heal if he touches something. The long scar on his back, the holes in his head: after they cut him open, the doctors at the center pulled him back together with surgical thread and plastered-on bone grafts, but the wounds didn't heal. They didn't heal right.

Simon twitches the lace curtains aside, peers out onto the street. "We'll need something less transparent," he says.

Any stops fiddling with the television. "What for? We aren't doing anything illegal in here, Mr. Disciple."

"I just mean, people won't like the idea of more than a couple Risen in one place. It'll set them on edge. Until we've got a good group behind us, I think it's best we keep kind of a low profile. We won't do any good getting lynched our third day here, you know what I'm saying?"

"I thought we came to stir up trouble."

"Not till we're able to handle it." He lets the curtains fall back, turns to face her. The room is dusty and closed-off smelling, but it's nothing a good airing won't take care of. There are boxes stacked against the far wall, mostly chemistry stuff but also Simon's computer, his clothes, a laser printer for pamphlets. "You said these people hate us. Let's try a little civil resistance first."

Amy bites at the edge of her thumbnail. "There's a pub downtown, the Legion. All the HVF people hang out there."

"Sounds like a great place to start." He smiles at her a little, the half smile that's about all he could manage these days, but opens his arms for her when she twirls toward him.

"But first," she says, face pressed into his chest, "there's someone I want you to meet."

"Who's that?"

"Remember those postcards I got at the commune? Kieren's from Roarton. We have to turn him to the cause," she says, suddenly excited, the way she gets sometimes, more full of life than anyone living he ever knew. "He's so lonely and good, Simon, you'll love him, I know you will. Promise you'll love him."

He smiles.

"I'll do my best."

* * *

It feels a lot like being alive. More than he'd expected. It turns out they can't feel pain but they can feel pleasure: Kieren's hands under his shirt, Simon pressing closer, closer, head bent over Kieren's mouth. Simon breaks away but keeps a hand on Kieren's neck, head down like an ox, backing him across the room until they run into the foot of the bed. Kieren's eyes are shattered rings of black and yellow and white, like exploded stars. He reaches up as Simon bends toward him, and his fingers linger and slide down his pulse point, down across his collarbone to his chest where his heart still lies, unbeating. "We're kind of a miracle, aren't we?"

"Yes. Yes, totally. And you, Kieren Walker, are beautiful." The empty space in Simon's lungs rattles with breath he does not need; his hands tremble. The last time he felt this unstrung he was high off his skull on meth, and still alive, but he found the first Risen today, and the second Rising won't be far off.

Soon, they'll be free. Soon they'll be as strong as they were meant to be.

He presses his mouth to Kieren's neck, whispers against it, "You're going to do such great things."


End file.
